Valve's Gabe Newell took the unusual step of breaking his silence on recent developments inside Valve after it was reported yesterday that as many as 25 employees have been let go. Valve did not confirm that that number was accurate. Among those confirmed to be leaving the company are Valve’s director of business Jason Holtman and hardware engineer Jeri Ellsworth.

While Newell would not talk about changes in staffing, he did confirm that no big changes in Valve's various projects were planned. Speaking to Engadget, Newell said:

"We don't usually talk about personnel matters for a number of reasons. There seems to be an unusual amount of speculation about some recent changes here, so I thought I'd take the unusual step of addressing them,” said Newell.

“No, we aren't cancelling any projects. No, we aren't changing any priorities or projects we've been discussing. No, this isn't about Steam or Linux or hardware or [insert game name here]. We're not going to discuss why anyone in particular is or isn't working here."

Comments

Perhaps they were cleaning house and getting rid of undesirable employees? When EA recently did this to Bioware the talk was about the the failings of Bioware rather then noting people like Stanley Woo were forced out of a job because they had become bitter and grown to dislike their job.

Yeah it kind of sounds like that could be the case. Valve has a unique workplace culture because they don't have any managers. I can imagine some people have trouble staying motivated in that kind of culture and it may be hard to get rid of them without some sort of leader taking notice.

Maybe they realized it was a problem and did something about it.

Or maybe a bunch of people just decided they wanted to do something else or wanted more money. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯